Breaking The Union

Pádraig Yeates

A collection of essays about the 1913 Dublin Lockout impresses across a wide range of fields.

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A Tearless People

Pádraig Murphy

The year is 1937 and the place Moscow, one of the key settings in European history and a fault line in the history of civilisation.

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And Another Thing

Enda O’Doherty

The most recent translation of WG Sebald’s work offers the expected pleasure of his engaging prose style and an introduction to the world of some intriguing German writers.

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A Millionaire of Words

Morten Høi Jensen

Joyce’s funny, moving and infuriating masterpiece should send us, not into the cold and sterile embrace of the examination room, but out again into the warm and throbbing world.

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Sacred Egoist

Michael McDonald

The Italian critic and editor Roberto Calasso enjoys a considerable reputation among the literary-critical elite, but how much substance or originality is there in his anti-rational musings?

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Not telling

Maureen O’Connor

Edna O’Brien’s memoir refuses to satisfy our curiosity or submit to the demands for interpretation. She has fought others’ desire for control from childhood, and in her eighties is still fighting.

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1916 As Spectacle

Angus Mitchell

In an age when martyrdom is demonised and tagged with notions of fanaticism and people are reluctant to protest for a cause let alone die for one, 1916 presents an easy target.

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Trompe l’Oeil

Keith Payne

All is very far from what it seems in a literary mystery novel by poet Ciaran Carson set in Belfast and Paris.

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Street Smart

Fintan Vallely

Lyrics have been defined as short poems written to the accompaniment of a musical instrument, but should Paul Muldoon’s lyrics be judged primarily as poems or as songs?

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Morning Glory Beyond Rathmines

A Dublin poem, of going and returning, from Gerard Smyth.

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The Orwell Prize

The prestigious British prize has announced its annual winners in the categories of journalism and political writing, together with a special prize for foreign correspondent the late Marie Colvin, who died in Syria.

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Speak the Best Word

Margaret Fuller, writing in 1840, had some very pertinent things to say about people who have opinions and like to sound off.

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Secrets of the Irish Landscape

This book examines many little understood aspects of the Irish landscape from the last Ice Age until now. Historians, archaeologists, biologists and earth scientists each bring their own perspective on  the landscape and the life it has supported, giving a new understanding of the history of the Irish ecosystem.

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Edmund Burke

 New biography of  the Irishman now claimed by the Conservatives as their founding father. The author see Edmund Burke as one of the eighteenth century's golden generation, which includes his friends Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon. In this book Burke is seen as a now underrated dazzling orator and visionary theorist.

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Towards Commemoration

Contemporary Ireland, north and south, was founded in the decade 1912-23. From the signing of the Ulster Unionists' Solemn League and Covenant to the partitioning of the country and subsequent civil war in the Irish Free State, a series of events shaped Ireland  for the century to come.

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